When Gaddafi steps out

And there it ends. Gaddafi succumbs to wounds. The columnist at the Time wants to believe that his last words would have been “don’t shoot”. Everyone has a right to his wishful thinking. And the Time wish is only just as innocent as its opposite – that he would have died fighting, in arms with his comrades, the last man in the last town of a long lost ideal smothered by reality.

Like most other leaders of the Arab world, Gaddafi lived in us through his pictures, pictures that blew him up to a hero, a David who would one day stand up to the Goliath. Davids and Goliaths – enduring myth from a region where power is never equal. Ironically, in the modern day imagery, the Goliath holds David’s star. It was against the backdrop of that star in blue (a colour which is absent in the flag of any other country in West Asia) that Davids rose in public imagination. And how many of them – Yasser Arafath, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi... But the David was, is, humbled again. Yet again.



Gaddafi lived in us, so far away from the Mediterranean shores, in the strangest of ways. “Usr” in Arabic means toughness. When we cross far from the Arab mainland into the Malabar coast, that word transforms a bit and come to mean a liminal space between naughtiness and stud-ness. To have “usr” and “puli” (Malayalam for ‘sour’) was to have some dignity and honour in life. And those kids who had “usr”, those kids who were loud and naughty and running around chairs - at family gatherings, at Iftar meets and in all those occasions when people gathered -were nicknamed, with so much love, as Gaddafi.

The painful bind that we were caught in during the First Gulf War couldn’t have been if not for the presence of the imagined (not just an imagination, but also as the looming image) of the two blue flags. On the one hand, in alliance with the Arab sheikhs were our means of livelihood itself. On the other, praying for Saddam, was our “usr” and “puli”, armed with the lores of generations, subdued by false hopes. Saddam lost, and the Arab kings continued with their beaming smiles from their framed photographs hanging from our walls. After all, it were they who transformed this community to its present state of luxury, from a generation of indentured labour in the tea plantations of Nilgiris and Ceylon, and the rubber plantations of Malaysia. Saddam lost, and we lost our dignity and hope. Strange how the figures of Gloiaths can turn even vicious oppressors into heroes. Saddam lived on, in hoardings, in places named after him (like the Saddam beach), in our local elections, in our day to day lores, passed on and on.

In all probability, if experience does hold any light to the future, we would never know how Gaddafi died. However evil the person, there is some poetry in holding on to evil. Like the evil itself can turn to something good, like Antigone’s and Gudrun’s refusal (from Zizek’s Sublime Object of Ideology), or (and most of us just don’t say it), the poetry in the death of Hitler, the way how he refused to be the exhibition piece of the Allied victory. Would he have actually said “Don’t shoot”? We’ll never know. More people are killed by words and images than they physically are. The Ottomans in their early modern primordiality engineered eternal death, the death from commemoration rituals. For them, the solution to avoid rebel pilgrimage sites was to throw away the rebel’s mortal remains to the gluttonous oceans. In the information age, the second and eternal death happens by engineering the murders through images and narratives spread through the ubiquity of internet. When internet lore takes over the folklore, by its bombardment of images as opposed to the painful recollection and rendering from memory, rebels are desacralized not by hiding but by over exposure. Quite strangely though Bin Laden was thrown to the sea, much like the Ottoman practice. May be the images had reached a breaking point already. In internet too, too much of an exposure can engender the citizen out of the subject.


This is the passing of an age. Gaddafi, Saddam and Mubarak were quite different from each other. But they were all product of the same time of history, a time when the Arab version of socialism compounded with Arab nationalism. That age has come to an end.